A recent focus on the problem of software patents raises the question: could Linux be sued off the face of the Earth?

The not-so-random thought came up this weekend when I read the New York Time’s special report, “The Patent, Used as Sword.” This article, which I highly recommend you read when you get a chance, comprehensively examines the broad landscape of software patents without really coming down too hard on one side or the other. It does, I should add, leave you with the sense that something is wonky with this whole idea that billions can be spent and companies can go down just because one side’s lawyers are quicker on the draw than others.

Desktop

he last week saw the number of distros with 1000 or more hits per day increase from 9 to 15 compared to the last month. What happened is that the total hits/day for the top 100 distros increased 9%, but the hits/day for the top 15 increased 20%. This means the world is becoming more focussed on the popular distros. A consolidation of distros is happening.

The new form of personal computing sits in the cloud. As computer users rely more and more on Internet services, and spend most of their computing time working online, it makes sense that operating systems would begin to focus usability around the Internet browser. We see that this exactly the case with Chrome OS as they have built an entire operating system platform and corresponding hardware systems around the Google’s Chrome browser. The XPUD operating system is actually designed to run completely within the browser. The Peppermint distro is a sleek, streamlined system that relies completely on cloud based apps and web services while maintaining something of a traditional desktop look and feel.

Kernel Space

ARM processors and Linux have been married for years. You name an ARM-based device—smartphones, Raspberry Pi, tablets—and you’ll find Linux running beside it. It’s not been a happy marriage though. For every ARM system on a chip (SoC) there had to be a different Linux spin. With the forthcoming Linux 3.7 kernel we’re on our way to seeing all ARM processors working with a single Linux kernel.

It’s not even Friday yet, but there’s more awkward entertainment today at the expense of Linux kernel trolls. The latest in the series of weird messages hitting the Linux kernel mailing list is a proposal to drop support for all CPU architectures but ARM and a new “invisible” file-system feature.

There’s been a string of messages on the kernel mailing list lately from alleged trolls requesting various functionality be removed from the mainline kernel or other weird changes that don’t make too much common sense: Linux doesn’t need x86 32-bit support, Linux doesn’t need keyboard support, and then last Friday was Linux doesn’t need multi-monitor, multi-user, Ethernet, and optical drive support.

A new installation image for Arch Linux is now available that sees the distribution’s default boot process switch from the previous System V implementation to systemd for booting the live system. Because of the change, initscripts are no longer available on the live system. However, the developers note that they are still installed by default, but this “is likely to change in the near future”.

A brief status report was shared concerning supporting the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) feature of HDMI under Linux.

Back at the Linux Plumbers Conference in August, the Linux developers meeting in San Diego decided to create a CEC bus with CEC clients that is independent of the Video 4 Linux 2 and DRM APIs, so that both those sub-systems along with other “clients” could use this HDMI feature.

Mesa 9.0 is the latest development version of the open source implementation of OpenGL’s specification for rendering interactive 3D graphics. The new release sets out to implement version 3.1 of the OpenGL API for selected hardware; the developers do note that the software reported version will vary dependant upon what is supported by the hardware and drivers.

Games

Steam for Linux has already entered beta phase and soon, users will be able to evaluate it on their computers. Its time more and more games are getting ported to Linux, along with Left For The Dead. Among in the list are some popular titles like World of Goo, Trine 2 and Serious Sam 3.

Valve has promised to launch Steam for Linux before the end of 2012, and last month it was confirmed that an external beta would be happening in October. It’s limited to 1,000 people, but the point is Valve seems to be on track to meet the release target of this year.

I wrote a quickie on Kdenlive last time and wanted to do a more thorough job this month because this is one killer video editor. If you like to make movies and show them to your friends, or even need software for a presentation, Kdenlive is your candidate. If you want to create something that looks professional, I can tell you that while it may not stand as tall as Final Cut Pro, Kdenlive comes quite close to Sony Vegas Pro or Adobe Premiere.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Web cam, a mobile phone camera or a high-definition camera; Kdenlive is ready with all the punches. The software supports so many formats that it’s not possible for me to give the list without missing out something (for the full list, visit kdenlive.org/about-kdenlive/audio-and-video-formats).

KDE users love Plasmoids, the small little widgets that you can put in your desktop or system tray. Well the default KDE comes with Plasmoids for RSS Feed, System monitor, comic strip reader to even a web browser! So why not a plasmoid for Apper updates?

Since it began more than 15 years ago, the international KDE community has grown bigger and more diverse than could have been imagined at the beginning. These forces created a need for clarity about what pulls us together as a community. Over the last six months or so, we have examined this critical issue, moving beyond assumptions and what has been taken for granted. In a rigorous project led by Kévin Ottens, many thoughts were distilled down to essentials. Today, we present the result of that effort: the KDE Manifesto.

GNOME Desktop

Gnome 3.6 has been released, and developers are now busy with the next Gnome release, Gnome 3.8. We have compiled a list of new apps that may ship with the next Gnome release, along with some handy screenshot for each. For time to time, we will keep you updated about development of these apps, most of which are currently in design phase.

Gnome developers are working to integrate the web services in your desktop, and Google, Facebook and Windows Live! have already been tightly integrated. This means you can access your Google and Windows Live! mails, documents, photos and more right from default Gnome apps. This makes working easier, specially if you use cloud services more than desktop ones.

Newer Gnome apps are set to make our lives even easier. Earlier we covered a few apps that will debut in Gnome 3.8. Gnome Reads is another new app that is being designed to make ebook reading easier, both online and offline.

When a woGue reader sent an email to us suggesting that we should try AriOS I wasn’t very optimistic. The description was showing the same trodden approach that we saw in so many other projects that is “an Ubuntu based distribution that offers a more ready to use Ubuntu”

AriOS is really not just simply one of those distributions… It is a truly carefully tailored operating system that offers exactly everything you need, combined with elegance and a sense of opulence!

Two Slackware derivates recently made it known that they are still alive and developing. One released their first new work in over three years. The other is an update to a release now a year old. AgiliaLinux is known to release once a year, but most thought Draco was pushing up daisies.

With so many Linux distributions out there, it can be difficult to keep tabs on all the updates that come out over the course of an average week or month.

I’ve featured a few key arrivals over the past few months–including PCLinuxOS 2012.08, OpenSUSE 12.2, the Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1, and Sabayon 10–but several others have appeared in short order as well, making the challenge more difficult than ever.

Arch Linux is now one of the most popular Linux distributions out there and that is for a good reason. It is the distribution with the largest number of available packages, the most recent/up-to-date packages, the rolling release nature, one of the most complete and comprehensive documentations and one of the biggest userbases out there (that is certainly the most knowledgeable too).

I am new to Linux and about 3 months ago tried Zorin 5.2 Core. I was very impressed with a Linux based operating system and decided to make my laptop a dual boot with Win7. I wanted a very stable Debian distro. I found Solus OS which seemed to have what I was looking for in a distro.

New Releases

Parted Magic lead developer Patrick Verner has released an update to his specialist Linux distribution for hard disk partitioning and duplication that includes a new version of the Gnome PARTition EDitor (GParted) with LVM support. Newly supported LVM features include the ability to create, check, move and delete physical volumes; resizing is currently only partially supported.

Red Hat Family

The new Zend Server for Red Hat OpenShift offering provides a professional-grade PHP development and runtime environment, delivered with the benefits of the OpenShift PaaS. PHP applications deployed to Zend Server for OpenShift can access built-in debugging, monitoring and application performance tuning capabilities, making application development and management easier.

Every year, Marbles in downtown Raleigh holds their annual Big Idea Forum. The lunchtime discussion aims to highlight ways corporate and community leaders shape organizations and people through inspiration and innovation.

Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO of Red Hat, Inc., opened up to Ron Wilder, a business author and executive coach, this past Wednesday, October 3rd, to talk about his big idea.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

While LLVMpipe may be a different story, when using hardware-accelerated graphics drivers with the recently released Unity 6.8 desktop, the performance doesn’t change much. For at least one driver, there’s even a new OpenGL performance regression under certain workloads. Here’s some test results of Unity 6.6 vs. Unity 6.8 on the Radeon and Nouveau drivers.

The Ubuntu juggernaut is moving ahead and huge improvements and brand new features keeps pouring in. Every new Ubuntu release cycle gives you the impression that, things have really been improved and enough features have been added, until you start seeing the changes being done in the next release cycle. Case in point is the latest Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases. Lets see what makes Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal one of our favorite releases till date. 23 things new in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.

Customizing Unity is easy and fun, specially because of its ever growing set of lenses, with new ones coming out almost everyday. Previously we had featured a Python Doc search lens for developers, and this time, Unity GitHub lens will also come handy for devs to search GitHub repos and users.

Ubuntu 12.10 release is coming closer and Canonical has just opened up a new section in its store for Ubuntu 12.10 DVDs. While you can download the .iso file for free and burn it into a disk, it becomes handy to keep a DVD with you, specially if you want to install it on multiple computers and show it off to your friends.

A few of the new features will be in the installer (see the state of manual LVM and full disk encryption configuration in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity), while most will be on the running desktop environment itself. If you have been following the development of this next edition of Ubuntu, especially via the blog of Jono Bacon (see On The Recent Dash Improvements), I am sure you must be familiar with the issue surrounding the search results that the system throws in front of you when you use the Dash to search for content.

Canonical has come under some heavy criticism in the past couple of weeks with its controversial decision to include Amazon shopping results in the Ubuntu Dash search results. I have to admit, when I first read of the news I was also enraged with a certain amount of anger and honestly couldn’t believe that our beloved Ubuntu had fallen victim to the commercial trap. The more I thought about the issue the more accepting I become of the concept. Allow me to delve a little deeper in to my thoughts and explain to you what I mean.

Ubuntu Software Center (USC) other than making software installation easy, it is more important because it helps us to discover Apps and the see their ratings and comments from people that they already have used them.

Unfortunately USC is only available in Ubuntu and Ubuntu spins and derivatives, but apparently it seems there is a web-interface (somewhere hidden) that everyone can access no matter the distro. Even with Windows and Mac.

Ubuntu Tweak is a open-source teaking tool for Ubuntu that allows you to customize your Ubuntu desktop the way you like. Apart from regular tweaks, the updated version Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.0 comes with a native app store.

Learning some basic methods to navigate and customize the launcher can make it an efficient tool that is used to complete daily tasks. With several icons located in the launcher, reordering the applications may reduce your time searching for your desired program to execute.

In an effort to appease users, Canonical has pushed out some updates to its Unity interface in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release that include a simple turn-off function for the controversial Amazon.com “lens” feature. But will this be enough to calm an unruly community in near revolt over the company’s original plans to push this functionality on users?

The “fix” for the much-berated Amazon feature comes among a slew of updates, most of them simple bug fixes, that landed with version 6.8 of Unity. It was uploaded into the development version of Ubuntu 12.10 Oct. 5.

Looking back at the progress of Ubuntu over the years, including the various off-shoot distributions based on it, I cannot help but be amazed. I find myself amazed at the improvements made to the desktop, both in usability and new features.

But sadly, some of these improvements mean that slower performing PCs will be left out in the cold.

In this article, I’ll discuss what Ubuntu is doing to make using the Unity desktop more difficult for older PCs, examine whether or not this matters and talk about options are for all of us going forward.

FXI has announced that the Cstick Cotton Candy any screen microcomputer development platform has passed CE and FCC certification and is now available. It allows any Intel processor based laptop or PC with a USB connection to be used as a thin client to the Android or Linux Ubuntu operating systems running on the Cotton Candy.

Raspberry Pi, a $25 hackable credit card sized computer, is taking leaps in development and is becoming a hot bed for experimentation. Earlier, we had seen people using Raspberry Pi for different innovations such as shooting photos from space or for controlling home equipment, but this time, a hacker has used a Raspberry Pi to make a perfect beer brewing controller.

A few small commercial breweries were already using Raspberry Pi for automation, but Elco (creator of BrewPi) has open sourced the code and has made it available for the community. The BrewPi website has detailed instructions that will allow you to set you your own cheap brewery at home.

Phones

Jolla Tides, a Jolla blog posted a poll on October 1 asking the users which kind of device they like and going by the results till now it seems MeeGo users want a QWERTY keyboard instead of a full Touchscreen only device. Till now 46.73 % respondents voted for QWERTY design whereas only 29.79% want full Touchscreen.

Ballnux

HTC and AT&T’s have announced two new smartphones – the HTC One X+ and HTC One VX. The HTC One X+ is the first smartphone in the U.S. running HTC Sense 4+ on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), while the HTC One VX will be running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

Android

It’s no secret the biggest downside to Android is fragmentation, the dirty F-word that comes with the territory of playing in Google’s open source playground. Fortunately for Android fans, Google’s mobile platform has tremendous upside, but it doesn’t help when handset makers highlight the negatives, as Motorola recently did by reneging on a promise to update all devices to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

Family trees are monstrous wonders of genetic distillation, alternately yielding grotesque and delightful offspring. And, as is nature’s wont, it’s within the strongest of these “carriers” that dominant traits are passed on, ensuring a continued legacy for a specific branch marked by beauty, brains or beastliness. And so the same rings true for the RAZR lineage: a once forgotten, but now revived brand that’s helping to define the new Motorola (as experienced through Verizon). Tucked safely under the protective wing of Google’s guardianship, the manufacturer’s embarking on a wireless renaissance and soldering that second chance at relevance to the Kevlar back of its latest Droid progeny. But as with all litters, there’s bound to be one runt and here that distinction belongs to the Droid RAZR M.

It seems Google is having some big plans with its Nexus Brand. A source has tipped Android and Me that Google is planning to launch a new Nexus Program. With this program, they want to lure as many manufacturers as they can to make “Nexus” devices. The new devices may not be exactly Nexus “Branded” but more like “Nexus” Certified and will enjoy the “Nexus” benefits.

We can sense that something big is coming from the world of Google, Android and Nexus. The rumor mill and clue hunting has marked the beginning of Nexus Fever. Recent evidences suggest that Android 4.2 on a Motorola Nexus phone and tablet may be on the cards. People behind Android Police have done some “Sherlock Holmes” stuff and extracted some pretty interesting information from server logs.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

I love my Nexus 7, just wish it had more space as my 16GB is full after I downloaded 5-6 HD games which consume around 2GB each. If there was a 64GB model I would have bought that one, alas 16GB was the most I could get at that time. Now, the rumors have it that there may exist a 32GB Nexus 7. According to Droid-Life ‘Carephone Warehouse’s internal systems revealed the possibility of a 32GB Nexus 7′.

Do you remember WebTop from Motorola? For people who don’t have any clue what I am talking about, the WebTop concept was introduced by Motorola with Atrix 4G which allowed the phone to be docked into a special laptop accessory, activate a custom version of Linux to act as the brain of the laptop. It can be easily guessed the device was a commercial failure and Motorola is against devoting any more resources towards its development.

Few weeks back I visited Auroville to meet my friends from BlueLight. BlueLight is a non for profit shop which does all the consulting related to IT and Open Source software. They manage infrastructure for many organizations inside Auroville. They have a diverse team with people from Russia, Gemany, India, France and other countries. They manage a Cyber Cafe which is running on Ubuntu and I was surprised to see the internet savvy users had no issue in using Linux.

It struck me this morning when I was reading up about this cool little open source operating system called Contiki, a very lightweight embedded OS designed to work well with the Internet of Things.

My colleague Rohan Pearce has a great write-up about Contiki over on Techworld Australia, detailing what Contiki and the Internet of Things are and how they work. But the passage that struck me was this one:

The Hong Kong newspaper, which has 1.3 million page views and about 500,000 people visiting the website each week, approached Catalyst originally as one of four companies it had selected worldwide to invite to tender.

Most of the buzz around the cloud has centered on infrastructure as a service (IaaS). However, IaaS is no longer good enough. Sure, you can forgo buying servers and run everything virtually on Amazon’s EC2 server farm. So what? You still have to manage it, and to do that you’ll have a growing IT bureaucracy. Companies that want to focus on writing their code and not have to think about application servers at all are now looking to platform as a service (PaaS).

Events

Now that Ohio Linux Fest is in the books and now that the only thing really left on the Linux horizon is LISA in San Diego just after Thanksgiving — but then, LISA is not for us mere mortals, but for the hallowed and revered system administrators. So we get to set our sights on Linux/FOSS events for next year.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Reditr is to Reddit what Tweetdeck is to Twitter. And now you can experience it under any GNU/Linux based system thanks to Google Chrome. Today Reditr has made its desktop app available for download. At the moment the app is available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu. It’s may be disappointing for some users as the app is not yet available for rpm based systems such as Fedora, openSUSE or Mandriva.

A new stable release of the Google Chrome browser is now available. This version, 22.0.1229.92 fixes a number of stability issues and security venerabilities and also features an updated version of Flash. Google Chrome, and Chromium browser features inbuilt support for flash from version 20.

Mozilla

Mozilla is in the process of updating all Firefox channels in the coming ways. Firefox 15.0.1 will be updated tomorrow to version 16.0, followed by updates for the browser’s beta, aurora and nightly channels bringing the respective versions of the browser to 17, 18 and 19.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

“I use LibreOffice, and will no longer use OpenOffice,” said Google+ blogger Linux Rants. “Oracle’s heavy-handed attempt at taking it over soured me to the entire project. I realize at this point that it’s been given back to the community, but the damage has been done for me. I moved to LibreOffice as soon as it was available, and have no plans on returning to OpenOffice.”

For ages I have been convincing people to switch from close source to open source, from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. I have been telling people to ditch the controversial docx format and adopt .odt only to find myself in an embarrassing situation, thanks to Google.

CMS

“A content management system (CMS) is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content on a web site as well as maintenance from a central page. It provides procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual steps or automated cascade. The core function of Content Management Systems is to present information on web sites. CMS features vary widely from system to system. Simple systems showcase a handful of features, while other releases, notably enterprise systems, offer more complex and powerful functions.”

Drupal is one of the most powerful open-source CMS platform available currently, but in spite its power and flexibilty, the software suffers from contributor crisis and unpopularity. In a recent interview to opensource.com, Doug Vann, a training consultant at Drupal community cited brain drain as the main reason preventing widespread adaptation of Drupal.

BSD

Following the recent Phoronix news articles about an easy way to try out FreeBSD 10 in its current development state along with Clang becoming the default compiler, there’s been questions raised by Phoronix readers about the FreeBSD ARM support. Simply put, at the moment it’s not in as good of shape as it is for Linux. ARM is considered a “Tier 2″ architecture of FreeBSAD with no official releases or pre-built packages being made by the project.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

There are distros we decline to recommend that offer the user the option of installing only free software. Given that option, a user who values freedom strongly enough, and thinks about the issue, can make those distros respecting her freedom.

A distro that offers that option is clearly better than one that fails to offer that option. But that option does not make the distro ok to recommend in general. After all, most people in our community are not conscious of this issue. We cannot expect most of them to reject nonfree software just because the distro offers a way to do so.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

From time to time, I have the opportunity to speak with someone from EnterpriseDB, a company devoted to bringing the open source PostgreSQL database to organizations of all sizes. The propose of the call was introducing EnterpriseDB’s new Multi-Master Replication (MMR) capability. The conversation then went on to focus on how EnterpriseDB was trying to compete with giants, such as Oracle, to win over decision-makers and database architects.

Open Hardware

For the last several years, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. In fact, an Open Source Robotics Foundation is now driving many global efforts to produce next-generation robots and share source code for them. Now, a brand new open source hardware platform created by the University of Bonn’s Team NimbRo performs many specialized functions and can even play soccer.

In previous articles, we’ve looked at the question of how free are the phones that people use every day, and looked at the theory behind building your own GSM phone network using open source software. Now, in this article we take a look at the sysmoBTS, a small form-factor GSM Base Transceiver Station (BTS) built around these principles and the steps required to configure it to provide a standalone mobile telephone network that is useful for research, development and testing purposes.

Amazon has announced that developers can now submit apps for distribution later this year in Japan. It’s all part of their plan for developers looking to build, market, and monetize their apps and games.

Security

Finance

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) hired Andrew J. Donohue as managing director in its legal department, deputy general counsel of its asset management division and general counsel of its investment companies group.

Mr. Donohue, who goes by the nickname Buddy, served as director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Investment Management from 2006 to 2010. Most recently, he was a partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP.

Censorship

Yesterday Matthew Woods was given 12 weeks in a youth offenders institution for posting jokes about the missing 5 year old girl April Jones (see Padraig Reidy’s write up of this yesterday on the Index on Censorship blog). Today Azhar Ahmed was given a community order for posting some very stupid and offensive comments about soliders.

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The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again